WELLMARKhttp://wellmark.com.au
A creative agency delivering complex messages to niche audiencesThu, 15 Mar 2018 22:25:20 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.7.9Wellmark’s feature article in Marketing Weekhttp://wellmark.com.au/2018/03/wellmarks-feature-article-marketing-week/
Thu, 15 Mar 2018 22:25:20 +0000http://wellmark.com.au/?p=5448 Our Associate Creative Director, Ryan Wallman, has written an article for Marketing Week. In the article, Ryan explores why modifying your logo can be an effective advertising technique, with plenty of intriguing examples. You can read the article here. By Candice O’Sullivan, Director and Head of Strategy at Wellmark. You can follow Wellmark on LinkedIn or on […]

]]>The worst headline ever writtenhttp://wellmark.com.au/2018/02/worst-headline-ever-written/
Wed, 21 Feb 2018 05:58:24 +0000http://wellmark.com.au/?p=5381 A few weeks ago, I was scrolling through LinkedIn (look, I was bored, OK?) when I stumbled across this headline. I think you’ll agree that it raises several questions. Questions such as ‘WTF is going on here?’ and ‘How can I get those 2 seconds of my life back?’. I hate this headline so […]

A few weeks ago, I was scrolling through LinkedIn (look, I was bored, OK?) when I stumbled across this headline.

I think you’ll agree that it raises several questions. Questions such as ‘WTF is going on here?’ and ‘How can I get those 2 seconds of my life back?’.

I hate this headline so much that I would prefer to just ignore it and erase all traces of its memory with a bottle of methanol-contaminated bootleg Siberian vodka. But I’m a professional and I’m here to educate.

So where to start?

First, let’s consider the word ‘innovation’. On a corporate cliché scale of 1 to 10, innovation rates a ‘Sweet baby Jesus make it stop’. Overused, pretentious, and almost always meaningless, it is the mother of all motherhood statements.

So we’re not off to a good start. But there’s more to the awfulness of this headline. Much more.

Next is the excruciating concept of an ‘insight innovation’. This genuinely baffles me. Precisely how would one apply innovation to an insight? Does it mean that you have an insight but then realise it was a bit of a crap insight, so you come up with a new one? I don’t get it.

Anyway, if we assume that an ‘insight innovation’ actually means something (it doesn’t), my next question is how it might be ‘validated’. Is it like a parking ticket?

As you can see, I don’t have satisfactory answers to these questions. But what I do know is that this appears to be a genuine contender for the worst headline ever written.

So I suggested this on Twitter, and challenged people to prove me wrong. These are some of the glorious examples I received in response.

Do you have another one to throw into the mix? Feel free to send it my way.

]]>Med Men: where the parody lieshttp://wellmark.com.au/2017/10/med-men-parody-lies/
Tue, 24 Oct 2017 06:03:49 +0000http://wellmark.com.au/?p=5405 Before I became a writer, I was a doctor. That story would bore you, so I won’t dwell on it. But recently, while reflecting on my change of tack, I wondered: what if medicine was like the advertising industry? I’ll call this hypothetical industry “medland”. Let me tell you a bit about medland. […]

Modern medland was born in the 1950s, thanks to a group of revolutionary practitioners on Medicine Avenue.

Since then, however, times and tastes have changed. Medland is a very different place these days.

In today’s medland, doctors never talk to patients. There’s no need, you see. They just treat all patients the same way, by assuming everyone is a 20 year-old athlete in rude health. They justify this by saying that everyone WANTS to be a 20 year-old athlete in rude health.

So if you’re an 80 year-old nursing home resident, your doctors might not fix your broken hip, but they’ll give you some rock-solid advice about how to optimise your muscle recovery after your next triathlon.

One reason for this is that the doctors themselves are all young people in rude health. Most doctors in medland are under the age of 30, and almost all are forced out of medicine by 40. This makes sense, according to hospital spokespeople, because “only young doctors are savvy enough to understand the needs of tomorrow’s patients, today”.

And of course hospitals need to keep up with the times, too. For example, no self-respecting hospitals in medland still refer to themselves as hospitals. They are now “betterness hubs” or “full-spectrum wellbeing incubators”.

The services offered by hospitals have also been re-named. What used to be called ophthalmology is now known as “VXA” (or “visual experience augmentation”), and orthopaedic surgery is a “multi-bonal alignment solution”.

Meanwhile, hospitals now refer to their collection of services as “end-to-end” (although this initially caused some confusion because patients thought it meant gastroenterology).

That said, many hospitals in medland no longer provide a full range of medical services, preferring to focus exclusively on the treatment of fingers – i.e. all things digital.

So-called traditional doctors, trained in complete human anatomy, have been replaced by finger specialists. There is even a “digital prophet”, who makes wild predictions about the future of finger health despite having no medical credentials.

One notable aspect of medland is that doctors must win a lot of awards before they are taken seriously.

Fortunately, there are many chances to win awards, and hardly any awards are judged according to patient outcomes. A horribly botched brain operation, for example, could still win an award if it was beautifully filmed with some stirring music in the background.

Not uncommonly, a major award will be given to a procedure that wasn’t done in a real hospital, or did not involve a patient.

This happened only last year when a Grand Prix was awarded to a surgeon who later confessed that he was actually playing the children’s game “Operation”. The judges defended their decision on the basis that “it was a creative use of gamification that really engaged young people”.

Doctors in medland also attend a lot of conferences. This is not so they can learn from their expert colleagues, mind you – that would be narrow-minded and limiting. The speakers at medland conferences are people with no experience of medicine at all, such as celebrities. Sometimes these celebrities are even appointed as Medical Directors of major hospitals.

]]>A mini-manifesto for our industryhttp://wellmark.com.au/2017/09/mini-manifesto-industry/
Wed, 27 Sep 2017 07:49:06 +0000http://wellmark.com.au/?p=5362We ought to be thinking in terms of ideas, not gadgets. We should prioritise efficacy, not efficiency. We must be concerned with what is timeless, not what is trending. We ought to question the orthodoxy, not acquiesce to it. We should be motivated by results, not awards. We must use […]

]]>Monkeys on typewritershttp://wellmark.com.au/2017/08/monkeys-on-typewriters/
Thu, 31 Aug 2017 07:04:35 +0000http://wellmark.com.au/?p=5327I’m a discreet man when it comes to copywriting criticism. As a rule, I don’t like to single out specific companies for naming and shaming. But of course there are exceptions to every rule. Pretty much every time I’ve ventured online recently, I have been confronted by an ad for Accenture. Actually, “confronted” is not […]

]]>I’m a discreet man when it comes to copywriting criticism. As a rule, I don’t like to single out specific companies for naming and shaming.

But of course there are exceptions to every rule.

Pretty much every time I’ve ventured online recently, I have been confronted by an ad for Accenture. Actually, “confronted” is not the right description. More like “visually violated and intellectually insulted”.

It all began with this little gem.

As I said on Twitter at the time, this copy seems like it was written by a monkey with a typewriter, on a 3-day meth bender.

As you can tell, this particular copy-monkey is obviously quite partial to a portmanteau. Unfortunately, though, his drug-addled simian brain can’t tell when the portmanteau doesn’t really work. Here’s another one of his portmantattempts.

Queasyou? Then I strongly suggest you take an anti-emetic before reading any further. I’ll wait.

Ready? Here goes.

Rotate to the new? Rotate to the new??

It’s a grammatical abomination, of course. But that might almost be acceptable if it made a scintilla of sense.

I’m intrigued, you see, about how one might arrive at newness via a process of rotation. Is this an ad for rotisserie ovens? Hell, maybe it is – it seems as good a guess as any.

Clearly, the Accenture copywriter has a penchant for the surreal.

Or even the apparently impossible.

For example, you might think that ‘the future’ is merely a function of time. If so, prepare to be Accentureducated.

See, there you have it. Not only can you invent the future, you can actually reinvent it. Someone call Stephen Hawking and let him know.

These Accenture ads don’t always suggest the physically impossible, though. Sometimes they just go for the physically incongruous.

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that you wanted to advertise the concept of making a profit. What physical metaphor might you use?

Leaping? Soaring?

Or something like this?

And with that, I think we’ve sufficiently plumbed the depths of Accenture’s advertising.

]]>Staying human within the machinehttp://wellmark.com.au/2017/07/staying-human-within-machine/
Thu, 06 Jul 2017 07:12:17 +0000http://wellmark.com.au/?p=5348 When I was a medical student, I read a book called The House of God. It was, to say the least, an eye-opener. If you don’t know The House of God, it is a satirical account of an intern as he navigates the strange world of hospital medicine. By turns cynical, hilarious, tender and […]

If you don’t know The House of God, it is a satirical account of an intern as he navigates the strange world of hospital medicine. By turns cynical, hilarious, tender and depressing, it’s practically a bible for junior doctors.

The reason it is so popular, I suspect, is that it’s funny but also frighteningly true.

To give you an example, one of the “laws” of the House of God is: “At a cardiac arrest, the first procedure is to take your own pulse”.

When you’re an intern, The House of God feels like a pretty accurate account of your job – particularly the way that its constant demands can alienate you from the very people you’re meant to be helping. Despite the caring nature of the role, there can be an odd detachment that one experiences as a young doctor.

Put it this way. It’s hard – if not professionally impossible – to feel deeply for every patient you see when you have a list of 60 names to review by the end of your 15-hour overnight shift. When your pager is buzzing. When you can’t get that bloody IV line in. And when you’re worrying about whether you wrote the wrong dose of heart medication for the patient you just saw.

In other words, it can be a dehumanising experience.

Nevertheless, there are times when the raw humanity of the job smashes its way into your consciousness. I once looked after a patient with terminal cancer – a truly lovely lady – who died in front of me after weeks of suffering. Some 17 years later, the memory of her final hours still haunts me.

Ultimately, this contrast between personal connection and systemic disconnection is what the House of God is really about.

Samuel Shem, the author, reflected on his influential book 34 years after its publication:

“Some have said that The House of God is cynical. And yet in rereading, it has a constant message that I was dimly conscious of in writing: being with the patient.”

For me, this reinforced the need to stay human at work. It’s profoundly important for people in healthcare, of course, but it applies to every field to some extent. The recent suicides of overworked young people in advertising agencies have served as a sad reminder that even our own industry can grind people down.

Notwithstanding our obsession with technology and chatbots and AI and all the other substitutes we have for humanity, our work is still mostly done by people. For now, at least, we need to take care of them.

]]>Wellmark in the Australian Financial Review: Digital is a channel not a marketing strategyhttp://wellmark.com.au/2017/02/wellmark-australian-financial-review-digital-channel-not-marketing-strategy/
Mon, 06 Feb 2017 22:41:45 +0000http://wellmark.com.au/?p=5280 Our Head of Copy, Ryan Wallman, has written an article for the February issue of the Australian Financial Review’s BOSS magazine. In the article, Ryan discusses marketers’ current preoccupation with all things digital, and why he believes that digital channels will not change the fundamental principles of good marketing. You can read the article […]

]]>Our biggest hits of the year (and some new stuff)http://wellmark.com.au/2016/12/biggest-hits-year-new-stuff/
Mon, 19 Dec 2016 06:00:22 +0000http://wellmark.com.au/?p=5250 You know when a band runs out of good material, so they release a greatest hits album? That’s pretty much what this blog post is. But wait. Don’t leave just yet, because there’s also some new stuff here. With any luck, just enough to make you think this is more than simply a cynical […]

Our most popular blog post of 2016 was this one about marketers talking nonsense in Cannes. I suspect that’s because it was the most ranty. Also, who doesn’t love seeing high-profile people make complete fools of themselves?

The runner-up was this post on the topic of incongruity in advertising. It includes a truly heart-warming story about me swearing like a sailor at the age of four.

Then there was another ranty one about a marketer showing himself to be completely out of touch with the real world. Hard to believe, I know.

And this post about brand consistency got a decent response from the crowd too. Not a hollering-for-more response, exactly, but polite applause at the very least.

So those were the hits. Now for the new stuff.

I’ve put together some marketing predictions for 2017. Feeling pretty confident about them too.

Hope to see you back here in the new year. We wish you a very happy festive season.

]]>The problem of a marketer left to his own deviceshttp://wellmark.com.au/2016/11/problem-marketer-left-devices/
Mon, 07 Nov 2016 22:19:17 +0000http://www.wellmark.com.au/?p=5209 Last week, there was an article in Digiday in which the CMO of Pepsi said this: (Now, just in case you thought that creating ‘shorter’ work meant emulating Hemingway, he cited Pepsimoji – ‘The language of now’ – as an example. So perhaps ‘sillier’ would have been a better description.) Leaving aside […]

(Now, just in case you thought that creating ‘shorter’ work meant emulating Hemingway, he cited Pepsimoji – ‘The language of now’ – as an example. So perhaps ‘sillier’ would have been a better description.)

Leaving aside his almost certainly false claim that consumers’ attention spans have changed, I found the assertion that ‘no one is watching television without using a device at the same time’ to be the most worrying part of his statement.

Clearly, this guy uses a device (a phone, presumably) when he watches television. Equally clearly, the people he knows also use a device when they watch television. But to suggest that ‘no one’ does otherwise – no one! – betrays a staggering ignorance.

I can think of at least one person who has never ‘used a device’ while watching television – namely, my dad. Aside from the fact that he barely knows which way is up on a mobile phone, it wouldn’t even occur to him to ‘multiscreen’ while watching TV.

So not just some but MOST people do not multiscreen while watching TV. To those who live in the real world, this would not come as a huge surprise. But evidently some marketers live in a world of their own (or Mars, according to Bob Hoffman).

Of course we’re all naturally inclined to make assumptions based on our own experience, but the job of marketers – including those of us in marketing communications – is to understand the people in their market. It’s kind of fundamental, really.

To understand your market, you need to do your research. But there’s the rub. Why would you bother with research if you think you already have the answers?

And that, perhaps, is why so much marketing fails. Too many marketers simply don’t know what they don’t know.

]]>A video of marketers talking a lot (but saying little)http://wellmark.com.au/2016/09/video-marketers-talking-lot-saying-little/
Wed, 07 Sep 2016 07:13:01 +0000http://www.wellmark.com.au/?p=5151 The other day, I had the misfortune of stumbling across this video. It was filmed in Cannes (which is always a red flag) and it features some of the industry’s biggest names. Now, I’ve never met these people, and for all I know they are wise marketers who usually speak sense. If so, maybe […]

But sure, go ahead and ‘reinvent your business in a purposeful way’, if you can work out what that’s supposed to mean.

“We have to change the way we engage with consumers to actually produce stuff they want to see.”

Yeah, yeah, we know: advertising is dead and it’s all about ‘engagement’ now.

Just as every generation of young people thinks it invented sex, every generation of marketers thinks it invented the idea of appealing to customers.

“Consumers are much smarter than they used to be.”

This statement is huge if true. If people are now much more intelligent than their very recent predecessors, then the human race must be evolving faster than ever. Quick, someone call the evolutionary biologists and let them know.

“We want to be the next brand to define this generation.”

Since when has any brand defined a generation? Still, I guess this sort of hyperbole is to be expected from a spokesman for – I’m not making this up – ‘the world’s first community-driven SuperBrand’.

I have a term for these beliefs: delusions of brandeur.

“I’ve seen more change in the last 5 years than in the 25 years beforehand.”

This quote is from a highly experienced marketer – so perhaps we should give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that it made sense in context.

But when you hear this kind of thing from a marketer, you should be wary. It suggests a preoccupation with technology and a tendency to put tactics before strategy.

“You’ve got to be that holistic integrator as a marketer.”

Sorry, I don’t know what it means either. I tried to put ‘holistic integrator’ through Google Translate but there was no ‘gobbledygook to English’ option.